The movement reached its apotheosis in November 2006 at the Microcredit Summit in Halifax, Canada

Unfortunately, Yunus had embraced a long-disproven fallacy known as Say’s law — the idea that supply creates its own demand. As the late economist Alice Amsden explained, the core problem in developing countries is not the supply of basic items, but the sheer lack of local demand (or purchasing power) required to pay for them.

Similar policies were also implemented in the Global South throughout years of neoliberal structural adjustment.

Still, there are differences between the “Washington Consensus” policies of the past and those advanced by the brics. For one, China does not have a neoliberal economy

Even a decade later, an informal plebiscite for the renationalization of Vale organized by unions, students, and the Landless People’s Movement in 2007 was able to mobilize three million votes.

Community development, one of its officers giddily explained, could be a bulwark “against the leftist takeover of every hamlet in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.”

Similar mechanisms prevail at the un, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. Nationally, we aspire to live in democracies. Internationally, we inhabit a plutocracy.

Marketize, privatize, deregulate: the Washington Consensus mantra dominated policy in the developing world for a quarter century. For most the recipe was a disaster.

I guess this belies the notion that there was this national bourgeoisie that was in any way inherently progressive, or was a natural partner of the working class.

I think this was a very flawed analysis, and it remains so now. It imputes to capitalists a motive and an interest that they’ve never had. Capitalists have always and everywhere had only one interest, which is making profits.